This year I got a chance to talk with Cadence at DVCon on a whole bunch of topics, so expect a steady stream of blogs over the next couple of months. First up was an update from Pete Hardee (Director of Product Management) on, surprise, surprise, formal verification. I’m always trying to learn more about this space, so I picked a couple… Read More



Webinar: Achieve High-performance and High-throughput with Intel based FPGA Prototyping
FPGAs have been used for ASIC prototyping since the beginning of FPGAs (1980s) allowing hardware and software designers to work in harmony developing, testing, and optimizing their products. We covered the history of FPGAs in Chapter 3 of our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry”, which includes … Read More
A Detailed History of Qualcomm
From our book “Mobile Unleashed”, this is a detailed history of Qualcomm:
Chapter 9: Press ‘Q’ to Connect… Read More
Don’t believe the hype about AI in business
To borrow a punch line from Duke professor Dan Ariely, artificial intelligence is like teenage sex: “Everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.” Even though AI systems can now learn a game and beat champions within hours, they are hard … Read More
Leading Edge Logic Landscape 2018
The most viewed blogs I write for SemiWiki are consistently blogs comparing the four leading edge logic producers, GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF), Intel, Samsung (SS) and TSMC. Since the last time I compared the leading edge new data has become available and several new processes have been introduced. In this blog I will update the current… Read More
Self-Driving Car Catch-22 and the Road to 5G
In the novel “Catch-22” from which the eponymous 1970 movie was made we learn of a fictional bureaucratic means by which the U.S. Air Force was able to keep bomber pilots (who might be going crazy) from successfully requesting a release from flying missions based on a medical evaluation. The rationale behind this supposed “catch”… Read More
Don’t Stand Between The Anonymous Bug and Tape-Out (Part 2 of 2)
The second panel is about system coverage and big data. Coverage metrics have been used to gauge the quality of verification efforts during development. At system level, there are still no standardized metrics to measure full coverage. The emergence of PSS, better formal verification, enhanced emulation and prototyping techniques… Read More
Computer Vision and High-Level Synthesis
Computer vision as a research topic has been around since the 1960’s and we are enjoying the benefits of this work in modern-day products all around us as robots with computer vision are performing an increasing number of tasks, even our farmers are using computer vision systems to become more productive:
- AgEagle® has a drone
Machine Learning Neural Nets and the On-Chip Network
Machine learning (ML), and neural nets (NNs) as a subset of ML, are blossoming in all sorts of applications, not just in the cloud but now even more at the edge. We can now find them in our phones, in our cars, even in IoT applications. We have all seen applications for intelligent vision (e.g. pedestrian detection) and voice recognition… Read More
New Architectures for Automotive Intelligence
My first car was a used 1971 Volvo 142 and probably did not contain more than a handful of transistors. I used to joke that it could easily survive the EMP from a nuclear explosion. Now, of course, cars contain dozens or more processors, DSP’s and other chips containing millions of transistors. It’s widely expected that the number … Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?